Wednesday, March 20, 2013

Flip-Flopper

You know those high-anxiety dreams when you're in some high-pressure public situation and you suddenly realize you're naked? I just woke up from a dream in which I was on the first day of a new job, and everybody was dressed up all fancy, and I was dressed up fancy too, but then I looked down at my feet and saw that I was wearing — gasp! — flip-flops. I suppose that's a mild-anxiety dream.1

1 There's a bit of a generational thing going on in which younger people tend to have a much looser idea of what's a flip-flop-appropriate situation. Flip-flops are great and everything, but there have been some upscale-ish situations when I've had the curmudgeonly urge (which I most certainly did not act upon) to go over to a youngster and quietly whisper, "Uh, yeah, those ain't cuttin' it. You need shoes."2

2 I used to work with a guy who wore flip-flops to the office every day. It was a business casual sort of place, but this was most certainly outside the prescribed boundaries. (It's is a software company, and we techies are held to a pretty low fashion-bar — and the smarter the geek, the more they can get away with, and this guy was pretty smart3 — but still there are limits.) But he rocked those things everyday. His persistence eventually sort of won me over, gave me a modicum of admiration for his screw-you;-I'm-wearing-little-floppy-bits-of-rubber-on-my-feet-every-day dogmatism. (I am, of course, sympathetic in general to the personal uniform.4)

3 I consider myself a pretty smart geek, but I do not stoop to schlubiness. The uniform —always! (The work version of the uniform: a black polo shirt, not merely a black tee.)

4 Note: that linked-to version of the uniform is somewhat out of date. These things are always slowly evolving.

4 comments:

I relate to aside #2. I'm a teacher and one of my fellow teachers wears flip-flops every single day of the year. This is even more impressive when you consider that I live in Wisconsin. Four feet of snow outside? Flip flops. At first I thought everyone was exaggerating when they said he wore flip flops every day, but I've worked there for three years now. No one was exaggerating!

And that's the other thing: as flip-flops have migrated into new environments, they've adapted: leather flip-flops, shimmery gold flip-flops, wedge-heeled flip-flops. Flip-flops ain't just flip-flops any more.